yes, but many of these are super-slow, and decades out.
Tag: europe
France Hypocrisy
France has been among the most vocal critics of “big internet companies” and demanding various regulatory pressures be used to punish them. Last year it fined Google $57m for breaching privacy laws, and appears to be angling for even larger fines. So it’s difficult not to burst out in laughter after finding out that the French government is really, really mad that Google and Apple are protecting people’s privacy, when suddenly the French government wants to use those companies to engage in contact tracing. Indeed, it’s literally demanding both companies ease their privacy protections to help France track people who might have COVID-19.
as usual, europe’s posturing is all bullshit.
GDPR Impact
venture capital invested in EU startups fell by 50% due to GDPR implementation
Medieval Trade Routes
Even before modern times the Afro-Eurasian world was already well connected. This map depicts the main trading arteries of the high middle ages, just after the decline of the Vikings and before the rise of the Mongols, the Hansa and well before the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope.

Warning From Europe
Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well.
On Brexit
Brexit was a classic example of a collusion conspiracy. Many of the named politicians and businessmen above stand to gain millions of pounds from a hard Brexit that causes the British stock market to fall. Others stand to make millions from juicy investment opportunities they were offered in Russia. We cannot know for certain what the quid pro quo for those investment deals were at this time, but I strongly suspect that support for Brexit (and more general socially-authoritarian right-wing policies) was part of it. And now we’re seeing a rival collusion conspiracy surface. Not all billionaires stand to profit from seeing the remains of British industry sink beneath the waves, and not all of them are in the pocket of the Kremlin’s financial backers. There are a bunch of very rich, rather reclusive men (and a handful of women) who probably thought, “well, let’s sit back and see where this thing leads, for now” about 18 months ago. And now they can see it leading right over a cliff, and they are unhappy, and they have made their displeasure known on the golf course and in the smoke-filled rooms, and the quiet whispering campaign has finally turned heads at the top of the media empires. If I’m right, then over the next 4-8 weeks the wrath of the British press is going to fall on the heads of the Brexit lobby with a force and a fury we haven’t seen in a generation.
Battery production scaling
3 massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15% of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.
2017-08-08: 120 GWh by 2021
Factories planned by Chinese companies could have the battery capacity to produce more than 120 GWh by 2021 – enough to supply 1.5M Tesla Model S vehicles. This will be over 3x initial the battery cell capacity of the Tesla Gigafactory at 35 GWh
2020-08-10: European battery factories are situated in the wrong countries
Out of the 14 projects scheduled in Europe, 10 rely on CO2-intensive electricity production with locations in Germany, Hungary, and Poland. France, which produces 88% CO2-free electricity thanks to its 58 nuclear reactors, has only 1 gigafactory in the pipeline.
Copyright Protectionism
Dead people tend not to be very creative so I suspect that the retroactive extension of copyright will not spur much innovation from Eames. The point, of course, is not to spur creativity but to protect the rents of the handful of people whose past designs turned out to have lasting value.
europe importing a very bad law.
European Sleeper Agents
a european spin-off of the americans
The industrious life of a busy, frequent-flying Spanish consultant was a front. “Henry Frith” was an alias for a Russian spy, a so-called “illegal” who lived for 20 years under a carefully constructed “legend” — a false identity, complete with a fake history and background. He is the first “illegal” to have been uncovered and publicly named in Europe since the end of the Cold War.
Bogus Suits
In the case of RepDefense Solutions suing on behalf of Reputation Defender, that “company” was “formed” on the same day its lawsuit was filed. Just as attorney Owen Mascott’s link to any reputation management firm cannot be determined at this point, nominal company figurehead “Monica Andersen” is a similar dead end.
the kind of future dumb european tech policy leads to.